Archive for May 2013

Or not. Read all about it in Istvan Aranyosi’s Times Higher Ed article, here.

For those of you who don’t know Istvan, he is not crazy, and he is one of the most pleasant colleagues it has been my pleasure to work with.

He’s also got some pretty good people writing references on his behalf. So it’s truly a mystery how this happened to him. Or rather, it’s a sign, as he persuasively argues, that there’s something wrong with the system.

Note that Eric Schliesser describes Bilkent as a ‘fantastic institution’! It had occured to me that one of the obstacles Istvan faced was that people outside Turkey perhaps did not think of Bilkent as a fantastic place, but more as a ‘have you ever heard of it?’ place. I’ll be glad if I’m wrong.

Aret Karademir (USF) will give a talk on Thursday, (23/05/2013) from 5-7pm in TB130 on

“BUTLER AND HEIDEGGER: ON THE RELATION BETWEEN FREEDOM AND MARGINALIZATION”

ABSTRACT: The names of Judith Butler and Martin Heidegger rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship. As a matter of fact, the basis for the lack of a dialogical exchange between Butlerian and Heideggerian scholars is straightforward. After all, it seems prima faciethat there is an unbridgeable gap between Butler’s and Heidegger’s philosophical and political stances. For example, while Butler is a social constructivist, Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, interrogates the universal structures of human existence. While Butler is a radical democrat, Heidegger supported National Socialism whole-heartedly in the years of 1933 and 1934 and, even in his last interview in 1966, stated that “I am not convinced that it is democracy” that can solve the shortcomings of modernity. Be that as it may, I believe, the critical encounter between Butler and Heidegger might be philosophically/politically promising—especially for inquiring into the relationship between freedom and marginalization. My aim in this paper is to re-appropriate Butler’s philosophy from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time. That is, I will read Butler with the aid of Heideggerian concepts such as “Being-in-the-world,” “Being-towards-death,” “(in)authenticity,” “anxiety,” “guilt,” “authentic solicitude.” Due to this reading, I will claim that one’s freedom is dependent on the resuscitation of socially-murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will claim that the socially-sanctioned subject’s freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other’s freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other’s freedom is dependent on the socially-sanctioned subject’s freedom.

ABSTRACT: The human mind is able consciously, deliberately and reflectivey to vault itself cognitively out of the enclosure of current perception, motivation, emotion and action, and leap over to future or past or possible or even impossible facts, situations or scenarios. This is what imagination (in a strong, suppositional, propositional sense) does.The central argument is that imagination is uniquely human, with no apparent precursors in the animal world. This is one evolutionary puzzle. Furthermore, the capacities to imagine do not seem to have dedicated genetic bases or specialized brain sites, do not operate as modules, and are domain versatile. It is also not obvious what specific pressures in what specific domains may have selected for imagining, which is why the standard explanation by gradual natural selection is unlikely to work. The way out of these puzzles is to reorient the evolutionary analysis toward human ontogeny, regarded as a genuine space of evolution, with its specific and often dated pressures and its adaptive responses. Imagination results from ontogenetic responses to the mostly sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures of later childhood.